I don’t see any growth anywhere except in debt. Where does he think the growth is going to come from?
Jal, I don't think they're even thinking that far ahead - we're to the point that they're just trying to extend it for another minute, hour, day - etc. The plates are all in the air still, but something's gonna give sooner or later. 'Their' best hope is that if one crashes, that's the limit of the damage, and doesn't bring the while thing crashing down.
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We're ****ed. Where's Henry Bowman when you need him?
Fry started with pennies in his account in 1999, and with interest compounded over 1000 years, wound up having billions in his bank account in the future.
Only to find that a loaf of bread cost $1 million and a gallon of gas cost $5 million!
Chris Martenson (http://www.chrismartenson.com/) has a short 3 minute version of Karl's message. It is part of his crash course series. Here is a link to the 3 minute exponential lesson.
Analog
Posts: 543
Incept: 2010-12-29
arkansas ozarks
"I don’t see any growth anywhere except in debt..."
there's the trouble, in some circles they count debt instruments as production.
I remember as a kid those advertisements on Ronald Reagan's 'GE Theater' - "Progress is our most important product".
i guess maybe progress borders on intangible. But with GE's biggest sector now being Finance they've gone past intangible into ethereal... "Debt is our most important product..."
anyhow all i wanted to say is you dont need xcel to show exponentisl growth to your kids .
For the example of penny doubling for a month: In Windows, click: calculator, view, scientific, 1 * 2 (gonna double it when we hit =) x y (it's the key next to cos, third row fourth column) 31 ( y, doubles it thirty-one times) =
and you should see 2147483648 click F-E (lower left corner)
2.147483648E+9 which is $21,478,835.48
i taught my kids to use qbasic... imho was best wimdows' feature too bad it wont run anymore.
Steelhead23
Posts: 2043
Incept: 2008-09-09
Portland OR
No time to read the blog now, but as regards the tendency to ignore the implications of exponents, I must remind the forum that economic growth is also an exponential function. So is population growth - and consumption. In stark terms, there is an ultimate limit to human population size and economic growth. There is an input - solar energy - and stored solar energy in the form of fossil fuels, but that's it. Are we approaching that limit? No, but we are consuming the stored energy much faster than it is being replaced and we haven't devised very efficient ways of capturing that solar energy flow, although we are improving. My point is simply this, we cannot grow forever. Indeed, we must develop a system to avoid excessive consumption of our fossil resources before we have a sustainable system of solar energy collection or the human population will need to shrink substantially. I'm not going to do the math because that would likely lead to Club of Rome type errors - and I don't wish to get too depressing. I just want to make a point conservatives seem to wish to ignore - there is a limit to growth.
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"Give me control of a nation's money and I care not who makes it's laws" —Mayer Amschel Bauer Rothschild Benjamin Bernanke For-profit commercial banks are a menace and should be eradicated
“Whenever the legislators endeavor to take away and destroy the property of the people, or to reduce them to slavery under arbitrary power, they put themselves into a state of war with the people, who are thereupon absolved from any further obedience.” - John Locke
Previous post fired before I intended. The aforementioned Kyle Bass interview is in line with Karl; backed by more startling examples, graphs, and a look at Japan's ZIRP and non-solution mess (2nd half of video).
An excellent compliment to this Ticker (and most others).
It's been obvious for years that the FedGov's CPI and inflation stats were worthless. Do you have any recommendations for a source that would be more accurate? I've got a damned Norwegian HR manager trying to tell me that I should trust the USG's statistics given to an expat compensation assessment group. I know about Shadowstats and Case-Shiller. Can you recommend anyone else? I'd love to rub this Norwegian watermelon's face in some real truth!
Count me in among those who didn't watch it this time around because I watched it before thanks to somebody (more than one actually) posting it in the comment sections here years ago.
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"I do not suffer from Insanity, I enjoy every minute of it".
Doubling time is incidentally the way interest was expressed in the Ancient Near East (Babylonian civilization). "Maturity" was expressed in terms of "calving" (when your loan bore fruit). This is also the background of the invective by Aristotle and others against usury, because metallic currency was "barren" and therefore could not reasonably be expected to "increase" the way that productive investments can. Barley and commercial silver debts were separate spheres. Medieval proscriptions on usury did allow "rent" and sharing in the fruits of ownership, but not pure interest for the "use" of money, because they were aware that the incremental interest was not created along with the initial money, and would lead to irredeemable and (exponential) debt growth.
It is also interesting to note in this regard that the practice of jubilee (clean slates) was occasioned by the fact that people will only fight to defend their own land: they will not risk their lives to decide which absentee landlord they prefer to serve. It also allowed the sovereign to win political support at the cost of enmity from the aristocracy (the owning class). The rhetoric was of course in terms of mercy, justice, and defending the poor and the orphans.
Another interesting historical connection is that the text on the liberty bell is connected to this Jubilee concept, and thus the most fundamental liberty is not doing your own thing but having unencumbered possesion of your "land", or, in modern terms, the means to produce. Discharging of debts in bankruptcy is also something that has marked American society, in contrast to many societies where debt is inherited or can only be stayed, not discharged.
Another fascinating connection: The proceeds of the first performance of Handel's Messiah in Dublin were used to get people out of debtor's prison. Etymologically the word Halleluja probably stems from an Akkadian word for clean/pure used in a ritual in which one was declared debt-free -- but we only discovered that in the last 25 years, which means the original connotation of the word was propagated almost 4000 years without an explicit narrative.
Harking this far back is not as crazy as it seems: our grains of gold/silver (akin to barley), our seven day week, 24 hour day, 360 degree circles, etc -- all go back that far.
Turnstile
Posts: 11
Incept: 2009-09-04
Los Angeles, CA
"Bad philosophers are like slum landlords, and it's my job to put them out of business." -- Ludwig Wittgenstein
It's a good question as to why this discovery has not been recognized by academic economists, and perhaps I might be able to provide an answer: none of them want that kind of discovery. The style of thinking represented in Karl's post is a repugnant thing in those circles, because it provides no scope for theoretical counterargument.
What you're in effect doing is proving something on the topic of man--mathematically! And worse yet: it's not complicated enough, not enough of a labyrinth enough, not model enough, but sure, they might call it "interesting," but only in a disinterested way. These academic shop keepers have grown accustomed to their high office of Keepers of the Mystery, and such propositions as found in Karl's post ruthlessly crosses out their holy watch words, and the greatest blasphemy is to have claimed to posses the solution to the problem--that really grinds at the academics most of all.
Therefore they take on a decided dislike--an indignation toward that crude heathen (oh, the accusation of 'non-scientist', as if they had a monopoly of reasoned thinking--or even practice and nurture it) who lifted his hand against the Enigma, who sought to stop its perennially vital wellspring, and silence lips that with such satisfaction posed unending questions.
Yet, with the very next breath, these same academics that defend the almighty Enigma then will try to peddle off to us that it is only their prayers the Enigma answers; and what remains unknown to them they'll reserve for occasional footnotes--with only their arrogance to suggest that they have mastered the Labyrinth, with the exception of a few corridors--dead ends, no doubt, probably buried in rubble--whereas in fact they have not even gotten to the entrance. Doomed forever to conjecture, having chipped a few flecks from the lock that sealed the gate, they delight in the glitter that gild their fingertips. But of what is locked they know nothing.
And yet, surely, one of the first duties of a scientist is to determine the extent not of the acquired knowledge, for that knowledge will explain itself, but, rather, of the ignorance, which is the invisible Atlas beneath knowledge.
And what could possibly have been this man's criterion for claiming Karl a 'non-scientist'? Given the man's own confession it wasn't based off the content presented, as he praised that--oh, it does rub them the wrong way to praise someone not baptized with the cap and gown.
Will Karl's arguments of exponents be heeded? Who knows in an Age where there are no longer universal authorities. The distribution--or disintegration--of specialization has advanced so far that the experts declare one unqualified whenever the "non-scientist" encroaches upon their particular territory. It has been said that a specialists is a barbarian whose ignorance is not well-rounded.
Since Karl's proof allows for no refutation, they'll find it necessary to ignore.
I don't care if it makes sense -- only if it makes money. -- Me Bank (n): See scam, fraud and theft.Eat a bankster -- they're low-carb. What part of "shall not be infringed" was unclear?
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